It's good to see other people approaching this process with the sense of realism that is too easy for us to forget.
I think part of being human is our desire to quantify and measure everything. We often cling to factors like GMAT scores, GPA, age, years of work experience, admit rate, yield rate, etc.
In the end I believe that business school, more specifically business school admissions, is much more about your emotional intelligence, which is essentially impossible to measure. This explains why the essay questions they ask feel so funky/difficult. Compare this to your undergrad application experience: wasn't that so much easier? I think it's because colleges know that 18-year-olds don't know anything about the world
or themselves...